Middle of nowhere, metaphorically

Usage examples of timbuktu.

Company officials at the Backworld Expeditions offices in Cairo realized something was wrong when the desert safari group failed to arrive in the fabled city of Timbuktu on schedule.

Great prosperity was achieved and the cities of Gao and Timbuktu became widely respected as the centers of Islamic learning and culture.

Then the pilot leveled out on his approach to the primitive airport at the fabled city of Timbuktu and touched down with a firm thump.

Tell him we've found no sign of contamination and are returning to Timbuktu, folding up our tents and flying home.

Hopper intends to announce the closing down of the project, then lead his people back to Timbuktu where they will depart in their chartered aircraft for Cairo.

Tires and wheels, engine, transmission and differential, even the windshield and doors were removed for parts or sold for scrap, hauled off by camel to Gao or Timbuktu by an enterprising merchant.

Rather it was certain unsuspected conversations he had on both love and a haj in Timbuktu, and not long after that, love itself in Persia.

Without hesitations or allusions, with nothing in fact to calm the reader, he thoughtfully examined every sexual act that had ever taken place from Timbuktu to the Hindu Kush, from the slums of Damascus to the palaces of Baghdad, and in all the shifting bedouin encampments along the way.

He rocked back and forth and whistled, spread his short arms and clasped himself, floated naked down the Tigris at night and swam the Red Sea and penetrated Mecca and Medina and tarried in Safad, walked twenty-five hundred miles to Timbuktu to meet the other Ya'qub and soaked his feet in Lake Chad coming and going, marched out of the Sinai oblivious to two sunsets and three sunrises and plotted the passage of a secret comet in north Arabia, conversed with an oily stationer and an ethereal dealer in antiquities while composing three hundred million words in a Jerusalem vault, acquired one empire and destroyed another and finally rode an elephant to a palace, finally sat down beside a fountain in the palace to rest, finally leaned back with a small cup of coffee to read the old new lines in the palm of his hand.

He walked from Timbuktu to the Hindu Kush and floated down the Tigris to Baghdad and marched through three dawns and two sunsets out of the Sinai without even noticing he had no food or water.

He lived quite differently in Timbuktu and was a very wise man with his flocks of little children and their footprints in the sky, his journeys of two thousand miles in an afternoon while sipping Calvados in a dusty courtyard.

Thereafter, when he was in Lower Egypt, Strongbow always sent a runner to notify Menelik and the two of them would meet again on a Sunday in the same filthy open-air restaurant under the trellises of leafy vines and flowers, always at the same table where they had sprawled the first time, picking up their swirling raucous conversation as if they had never left it, heckling the peacocks and feeding the ducks as they gorged themselves on spiced lamb and endless carafes of wine, which they had to replenish themselves, the waiters having become too weak to carry anything as the years went by, Menelik making his way in a career of increasingly brilliant scholarship, Strongbow forever broadening the track of his daring explorations that reached from Timbuktu to the Hindu Kush.

The article in question, the said monastic gent in Timbuktu, he didn't also go by the name of Father Yakouba by any chance?

Say about seven hundred bottles marching right down to Timbuktu, for which the extraordinary item heretofore mentioned sent your father a thank-you note dated Midsummer night, 1840?

Why don't you send me to Timbuktu as a one-man missionary team, he says, and I'll convert the heathens there.